


gonna write a long journal entry about this tonight

by bellafarallones



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-03 05:22:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16319936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellafarallones/pseuds/bellafarallones
Summary: Turns out having a symbiote in his head is not good for Carlton Drake's mental health.





	gonna write a long journal entry about this tonight

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [今晚要写一篇关于此事的长篇日记](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16776025) by [popopopoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/popopopoke/pseuds/popopopoke)



The first problem was the corpse of a child cooling on the floor of the lab. The second big problem was that Carlton Drake was unbearably hungry, and without a chance to stop himself, reached out and took a bite.

Is it worse to have to think about how to get rid of a body? Or is it worse to dispose of it without thinking?

**Your teeth are too weak,** said a deep voice in his head. And then Drake felt like he was vomiting, black slick sliding up his throat and sprouting into a new mouth and long fangs. The mouth tore into the child of its own accord, but Carlton Drake felt every moment of it, every trickle of blood down his throat and churning in his stomach. 

**We are Riot. We are hungry.**

“What do you want?” Drake was on his hands and knees now, head hung and eyes closed.

**Live meat. This one is dead.**

She was certainly dead now. “And whose fault is  _ that _ ?” Carlton gasped.

**Yours, and you should be proud. I came to you because you will be a good host.**

“Okay. Okay. Live meat.” His own supernaturally long tongue lapped blood off the floor.

**Food,** said Riot finally.

“Right, right, I’ll get us food.” Drake hauled himself to his feet, brushed dust off his knees. Smoothed his hair. His hands were shaking.  _ Breathe in, breathe out,  _ he told himself _. _ He took a step towards the door.  _ Breathe in, breathe out.  _ His stomach was roiling with sickness, felt like a torn garbage bag, hanging in black shreds. 

_ Breathe in, breathe out _ . Two more steps.  _ Breathe in, breathe out. _ He pressed his hand to the scanner in the door, half-fell out of it into the corridor. Thank God the building was deserted. He didn’t want to think about how he might look right now.

His car, the last left in the garage for the night, was the color of an oil slick and illuminated  orangey yellow by the bulbs in the ceiling. He got in, leaned back against the plush seat, and closed his eyes.  _ Don’t think about what you just did. _ His hands were steady on the wheel. _ Don’t think about the bloodstain on the floor. _

“Hey Google,” he said aloud. “Find a seafood market.” Then, to Riot: “Tell me what you want and I’ll buy it.”

He barely managed a smile for the guard who saw him out of the parking garage and thanked his lucky stars for the car’s tinted windows. By the time he got to uptown, he was collected enough to parallel-park as masterfully as always.

The seafood market was mostly empty and lit with strings of bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Scales gleamed beneath open, empty fish eyes. 

**Get me a couple of eels, I like those.**

Drake pulled a silver money clip out of his pocket. This wasn’t the kind of place that took credit cards.

**I could just take them, you know. We don’t have to do things like everyone else does.**

Drake ignored that and went to the man standing over the tub of eels. “How much for three?”

The man pointed a thumb at the sign Drake had missed in the gloom. “You want me to butcher them for you? It’ll be extra.”

“Can you just give them to me alive in a bag or something?”

“They won’t live long in a bag.”

“I’ve got a better setup in my car.”

The man shrugged, pulled out a couple of eels, dropped them into a paper bag where they flopped wetly. Drake handed over the money, thanked the guy. The poor eels looked up at him through their own slime, silently suffocating in the air. Drake didn’t have much sympathy. 

Back on the street, he slid into the backseat of his car, protected by the tinted windows and lonely street. Then he opened the bag in his lap, and the smell of fish filled his nose. One of his hands picked up an eel by the neck and - Drake closed his eyes. Tiny fishy bones went  _ crunch _ , slime numbed his lips. 

**Mmm. This is good.**

When all the eels were gone, Drake folded up the bag and climbed over the console into the driver’s seat. “Can we go home now?”

\--

After Eddie Brock refused to reveal where the other symbiote was, Carlton Drake stalked up six floors from the lab to his office. Everyone in the hallway avoided him like a school of fish separating around a shark. His office door slammed behind him, and he closed the blinds on the windows looking out on the atrium. Then he sat down at his desk. The blue light of his computer screen illuminated the gaunt lines of fatigue in his face.

“Oh, God.” Drake put his head in his hands and pressed his palms into his eye sockets until he saw stars. “Eddie knows who we are.”

**Let him. I cannot believe what a coward you are.**

“You know how I got where I am now? By looking for threats and neutralizing them before they neutralize me.”

**You are the same as humans have always been. Wasting their energy wondering about a saber-toothed cat in the darkness, calling it prudence. Primitive.**

“Don’t you  _ dare  _ call me ‘primitive.’ My watch knows my heart rate! The treadmill in my apartment has an iPad attached!”

**Toys.**

“Without me you wouldn’t even be able to walk on this planet.”

That was a mistake. Suddenly pain surged through Carlton’s body. The symbiote inside him was tugging on his nerves like harp strings and causing his whole self to thrum with excruciating pain. He wanted to scream, but Riot had welded his jaws shut.

**You are powerless, Carlton Drake. I could kill you right now. I could put you in unbearable pain for the rest of your miserable life, until I find a host who knows his place.**

_ I’m sorry,  _ thought Carlton frantically.  _ Just let me go. I’ll do anything.  _

The pain disappeared as quickly as it arrived. Carlton slumped down boneless in his ergonomic chair. His nerves were still tingling, his muscles twitching. “What do you  _ want  _ from me?”

**I want you to take me on your rocket back to my home planet and allow me to lead my brethren to Earth.**

\--

There was a box of old journals under Carlton Drake’s bed, all the way back to high school when he’d first decided that he was going to change the world. Now he sat at a glass-topped desk in his penthouse apartment, and wrote in a black Moleskin with an expensive pen. It reminded him that his words were valuable. 

_ I’m thinking about buying new clothes. I like black and white, don’t get me wrong, saves time thinking about what matches, but it might affect how I think or prevent me from being as creative as I would be otherwise. I might be different now than I was before. Maybe I’ve gotten used to all this. Lost my edge. I should switch things up. And I could wear whatever color I wanted. Other people do.  _

**You’d look good in red.**

Carlton’s hand froze, and a blotch of ink appeared on the tidy page. Riot rarely spoke, but whenever he did, it pulled Drake out of whatever he was doing.

_ Today Eddie Brock called me insane and I kind of flipped. Was that the right thing to do? I couldn’t have convinced him I was right. Should have kept my composure. That usually works out better in the long run. _

**You’ve been composed for too long. I can feel that you’re angry.**

Carlton wasn’t getting angry. He was  _ stressed.  _ Usually journaling calmed him down, but it wasn’t the same with someone else watching. Especially someone like Riot. 

_ What is the point of saving humanity if they think I’m crazy? _

Now that was the kind of thing he usually wrote. The kind of thing he wrote if someone bumped into him in the corridor and he smiled and said it was fine but seethed internally for the rest of the day about how his staff didn’t appreciate him. But today he pressed on without conviction.

_ It’s about being a good person, I suppose. Being good is about doing what you know is right whether other people agree or not. And I know I’m doing the right thing. _

**Let’s go to the mall.**

“How do you even know what a mall  _ is _ ? I haven’t been to one in years.”

**You’re not the first human I’ve owned.**

“You don’t own me. We’re working together for mutual benefit.”

**I’m sure you would say the same thing about your employees.**

Carlton tried to put his pen to paper again, but Riot had taken control of his limbs. “I am  _ not  _ going to the mall! Do you know how famous I am? I’d be mobbed!”

**Then you will show them your teeth, and they won’t bother you.**

“I can’t scare people!”

**What is it you do when you threaten to fire your employees for breathing too loudly? Their heart rates rise, and you enjoy that. You scare people. Every day.**

Carlton shook his head frantically but his legs were carrying on without him. He  _ hated  _ when Riot moved him. Hated the loss of control. He was usually so good at controlling everything, needed to control everything. That’s why he’d never put the Life Foundation on Wall Street, even though it would have generated significant capital. He didn’t want to answer to any shareholders besides himself.

Now he was out on the balcony, looking down at the lit-up skyline of San Francisco. “Shit,” he murmured. He couldn’t stress. When he was stressed he started sweating, and that messed up his hair and his shirt and made his palms damp, and there was nothing worse than  _ that,  _ so Carlton forced himself to take deep breaths. This was happening, whether he liked it or not, so he’d better get used to it.

It turned out not to matter whether his palms were sweaty or not. Riot engulfed him, built him a monster. Laid sticky black hands on the silver railing.  **We’ll get there faster this way.**

Then Riot flung them off the railing. Landed hard in the alley. It was hardly five, the streets still bustling. “Please don’t kill anyone, please please please,” Carlton murmured.

**Oh, now you’re squeamish? Let me show you what we’re capable of.**

\--

Carlton Drake arrived to work the next day with dark circles under his eyes and a bright red tie fastened around his neck. He’d called his driver at five and told him not to come, thinking that driving would steady his nerves. It didn’t. He felt like everyone on the street was staring at him, which they probably were. He drove an obscenely extravagant black Jaguar.

Those stares were nothing compared to what he faced at work, though. “What’s the occasion?” one of the security officers dared to say.

Carlton turned his head like a whipcrack. “What?”

“Uh. You’re wearing red.”

Carlton tugged at his collar with two fingers. “Oh. Yeah. Well, you know. I like to switch it up sometimes.”

Drake could feel the sheen of sweat on his face. It was worse now even than when he had been interrogating Brock, and even then he’d been influenced by his own anger and Riot’s general impatience to do a few things he regretted. Letting Brock know he had a symbiote of his own, for example. He’d be easier to fight if he underestimated them. Drake hurried into his office and slammed the door.

**We don’t need him to underestimate us. I can destroy him either way. When is the rocket launch?**

“It’s not scheduled for another few months. After what happened to the last one, the re-entry system needed a complete redesign. We’ve built the new rocket, but all the software still needs to be perfected.”

**I want to leave today.**

“We’re not ready today.”

**We leave today.**

“I’ll see what I can do.” Drake opened up his computer and entered the three passwords necessary to access company records.

**I have seen your schedule. You are not normally in the lab in the evening. Why were you there the night I found you?**

“Oh, no reason,” he said airily.

**I am inside your head. I will find out.**

Drake screwed his eyes shut, tried to avoid thinking about it, but Riot could force him to do anything. He had stayed late since he couldn’t clear his head but didn’t want to bring work home with him. 

But he hadn’t stayed in his office. He had been going to the room where Dora died. He had been planning to look at the walls and the ceiling and the floor where she stood and spoke her mind and fell and died, and he had been planning to apologize. 

He should have listened. If he went there today, knowing what he knew about the nature of “true symbiosis,” he would have told her that she’d been right all along.

Riot said nothing. Slowly, Carlton Drake undid the red tie and shoved it into his desk drawer alongside the highlighters and paper clips. Yes, they would launch today. He and Riot could both die.

\--

The sun set, and Riot and Venom clawed at each other. 

People who lived outside California didn’t realize how could San Francisco got in the evenings. Wisconsinites could only imagine Los Angeles and women in bikinis on roller skates for most of the year, but that’s not San Francisco. San Francisco can be  _ freezing.  _ And Carlton both hated and longed for those moments when the fight tore Riot away from him, when he felt the cold air on his face, when he gulped down a lungful of air through his own lips. 

Then, when Venom and Eddie Brock momentarily separated, Carlton felt awful all over again. Eddie looked  _ happy.  _ Stressed, for sure, fighting for his life, but fundamentally comfortable with his direction in life. Happier than he’d looked the last time they saw each other. And even stranger, he reached out for Venom too quickly for it to be a conscious act. He must have  _ liked  _ his symbiote.

Then suddenly the air was humming with a lethal frequency. Carlton and Eddie lay together and alone on the launchpad. Finally Drake could breathe, no Riot compressing his lungs, no Riot squatting in the back of his mind and reaching out like a feral dog to claw at any rational thought. And he was  _ furious.  _

Here they were, just two men, and Drake should be the better one. He was smarter, richer, and better educated. He didn’t accidentally hurt the people he loved. So instead of running far away from Riot and this stupid launch like he really wanted, Carlton lunged. 

Eddie was bigger, and fought back with all the energy of a man with real convictions. But Carlton Drake unsuppressed by a “higher life-form” was a live wire. They fought with their fists until both their chests and jaws ached and the sharp edge of the platform cut into Carlton’s back. 

Brock was standing above him, but when he looked down at the dark water of the bay he also saw the writhing mass that was Riot. He could throw himself into the water, swim to shore, maybe even fake his death to avoid prosecution for wrongful death. Or he could return to Riot and kill Eddie Brock. 

He held onto the platform tight with one hand, and stretched out the other to Riot. Eddie’s kick came too late, and Riot flowed through them again. Together they put a spike through Eddie’s back and climbed into the rocket. All the preparations for launch had been made. 

Carlton caught his breath, Riot’s vice grip around his body keeping him from shaking. “Is Venom like you?”

**What do you mean?**

“Eddie seems to have… reacted to symbiosis… differently than I have.”

Riot paused. When he spoke again, Carlton could tell he was lying.  **Next to you, Eddie Brock is weak-minded. His head is so empty he wouldn’t feel the presence of another.**

Carlton wanted to hug himself, comfort himself with the pressure of his own arms, but Riot wouldn’t allow it. Maybe Venom was nicer. Didn’t force Eddie to do things. 

Speak of the devil. Venom’s grinning face appeared outside the window. Maybe he could be nice to Carlton too. And as he tore through the fuel tank and allowed roaring flame to rip man from symbiote, he was. 


End file.
